The ENCORA Coordination Action is a bottom-up initiative for creating greater synergy in coastal and marine management in Europe. It facilitates sharing of knowledge and experience and contributes to strengthening the interaction between science, policy and practice. Therefore national and thematic networks have been established, which develop and operate together a programme of networking services, such as Contact Search, Contact Database, Coastal Wiki, Coastweb Archive, Websearch, Coastal Forum and the Young Professionals Exchange Programme.

Are these services really used and appreciated? We want to improve the networking services where necessary and therefore we are eager to get feedback from our customers. However, coastal professionals are busy people with other priorities than sending their comments and suggestions. Nevertheless, we have decided to send around next month a questionnaire about the ENCORA services. We will do our best to keep it concise and to the point.

The EU funding of ENCORA stops in 2009, but many national networks (and some thematic networks) want to continue under the umbrella of the European Coastal Platform. This Platform will be established at the Littoral conference in Venice (28 November). For the follow-up, we want take account of the lessons of the past, to spend our future efforts in the most efficient way.

(e-NEWS )
www.encora.org